Though the prestige dramas of awards season are now long behind us and the crowd-pleasing blockbusters are still far ahead, you shouldn’t count out the spring season for some wild, weird, and wonderfully engaging cinema.
You’ve just got to keep an open mind.
This strange, in-between period is great for all the movies that fall through the cracks, all the studio also-rans, the cult screenings, and the hyper-indie single-theater festivals.
And this year, the springtime is rolling out all those options for OKC audiences.
Whether you’re wanting some oddball studio sci-fi, some uproariously fun and wild B-movie action, or something fully and gloriously experimental, you’ll be able to find it on city screens over the next few weeks.
‘Ash’ – now playing
The newest eye-popping, nerve-shredding filmic offering from groundbreaking experimental music producer Flying Lotus, “Ash” is all fully unhinged sci-fi horror of the bloodiest caliber.
It’s a time-tested sci-fi plot, ripped straight from any number of video games: an astronaut (Eiza Gonzalez) wakes up alone on a ship with no memory, no escape, and her entire crew dead.
When a (maybe?) rescuer – played by the always watchable Aaron Paul – shows up to help, it all devolves into paranoia, surrealist alien landscapes, and blood-drenched, teeth-gnashing otherworldly monsters bent on death.
So it’s not reinventing any wheels, but as you might expect from a wildly creative cross-medium mind like Flying Lotus, it’s all about the visuals and the mood here.
Shots are saturated and evocatively lit, everything in dense colors and skewed angles, and the landscapes and CG environments are made to pop eyes and melt brains, with even the sky itself breathing.
“Ash” isn’t going to win any Oscars, but it’s destined to be a late-night cult selection, and with new music by Flying Lotus himself scoring all the spacefaring strangeness and horror chaos, how can you go wrong?
“Ash” is in theaters now.
Wide Open Experimental Film Festival 2025 – Oklahoma City Museum of Art – April 4th through 6th
Once again, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art is set to host the Wide Open Experimental Film Festival in collaboration with Oklahoma City University’s Film Department.
The annual fest brings together short-form experimental offerings from all over the world, featuring plenty of American and Canadian works, but also selections from as far away as Belgium, Chile, and China.
Each of these experiments is a challenge to the norms of aesthetics and storytelling, and each is a strange little cinematic language unto itself.
The fully free, three-day event is broken into five programs, each offering a curated collection of shorts:
- Openings – exploring strange new beginnings and invitations.
- Another – looking at the world in new ways, or looking at new worlds altogether.
- Films for People – examining our own human bodies and brains and how they fit together.
- Break – considering the cracks in our world and our reality and how they break apart.
- The End – exploring mortality, destruction, and apocalypse, but also survival beyond the endings.
Saturday, April 5th, the WOEFF will even present a full in-person conversation from Kelly Gallagher, the experimental animator and boundary-pushing filmmaking mind behind Purple Riot Studio.
So if you prefer your cinema with a bit less easy explanation and a lot more indescribable heart and soul, you’ll know where to find your experimental fix.
The Wide Open Experimental Film Festival runs at OKCMOA April 4th through 6th. Admission is free.
For more information, visit okcmoa.com.
‘Escape from L.A.’ – presented by VHS & Chill – Bookish – April 17th
OKC’s premiere pop-up purveyors of cult wackiness and B-movie mayhem are at it again in April when they’re set to bring one of the 90s very best and most awesome action satires to the backroom at Bookish with John Carpenter’s “Escape from L.A.”
The sequel to Carpenter’s 1981 dystopian classic “Escape from New York,” “Escape from L.A.” is as much a blunt, sardonic statement about the 90s excesses of Hollywood fame, mass media, celebrity politics, and religion as it is a parody of its own earlier installment.
In “New York,” the living legend of Kurt Russell plays the untouchably cool criminal anti-hero Snake Plissken, tasked with infiltrating the walled-off, gang-controlled mega-prison that was once NYC to rescue the missing President.
Fifteen years later, Plissken is back to break into the desolated remains of Los Angeles, which a new, hyper-religious, openly fascist President has left to ruin after the inevitable killer earthquake broke it off from the mainland.
The President’s daughter has been kidnapped by anti-capitalist rebels and Snake has to find her – and more importantly, recover the government’s doomsday weapon the kidnappers also stole – or he’ll be killed by a secret virus his military handlers have injected him with.
Along the way, he teams with old friends, obnoxious fame-seekers, and hippie surfers while facing murderous plastic surgeons, deadly basketball games, the Santa Ana winds, and of course, comically bad 90s computer graphics.
If it all sounds certifiably insane, you’re right.
It’s also undeniably fun and infinitely exciting, and it lampoons practically every major cultural and political lightning rod of today with the exact opposite of subtlety.
And let’s just be honest here: Snake Plissken is the single coolest movie character of all time.
“Escape from L.A.” screens at Bookish on April 17th, presented by VHS & Chill. For more information, visit vhsandchill.net.
Catch Brett Fieldcamp’s film column weekly for information and insights into the world of film in the Oklahoma City metro and Oklahoma. | Brought to you by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Brett Fieldcamp is our Arts and Entertainment Editor. He has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for 15+ years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
